BETCHES LOVE THIS

As you can probably guess, I get a lot of emails. Girls asking me for advice, marriage proposals, sending me explicit (but always welcome) pictures of their private areas - it’s insane. In most cases, these emails get deleted. Some wind up in Ask a Pro or Sexts and Subtext, but for the most part the emails I get end up trashed because they’re either a) too long or b) trite and repetitive. I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised/annoyed because lots of girls want a male perspective on a lot of the same subjects. One particularly annoying recurring theme goes a little like this:

Dear Head Pro,

You rock! I’m having this one problem that is totally a real problem and one that I’m sure no one else has ever had. I’m incredibly popular and attractive, but I also do a good job of pretending to be completely oblivious. As it happens, I hang out with what I call a mixed group but is mostly guys because I crave attention, and I love it. The problem is that one of the bros I hang out with recently expressed interest in me, and by that I mean his hints and advances have gotten too obvious to ignore. I don’t like him that way, because I could barely be considered a shell of a human being and thus am incapable of genuine emotion, but he’s a really cool guy! How can I let him down easy but still maintain our friendship?

Hugs,

Terrible Pseudonym with the Word “Betch” in it

Four Attachments:
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Or something like that, anyway. I don’t know how it’s possible that 50% of my readers are living inside 80s high school romcoms, but apparently they do. It’s always some variation of “this guy who is my friend likes me, and I want him to know I don’t like him without losing his friendship.” If you, dear reader, ever find yourself in this situation, simply remind yourself of one thing:

That guy was never your fucking friend to begin with. Ever.

We can all agree that the trope of the platonic male-female friendship is more or less a myth, but speaking as real people we can also admit that yes, sometimes men are friends with women and nothing more. Maybe they’re both attractive but not to each other, or maybe they share one or two interests but have nothing else in common. It’s rare, but it happens sometimes. And that’s great! Bros love having a girl around who is neither trying too hard/being a WGG nor trying to fuck them. It’s nice, on occasion, to be able to talk to someone who has a perspective different from that of your bros, especially when making important, complicated decisions. The problem is that it doesn’t happen very often.

Despite what a lot of the people who email me think, life doesn’t work like a movie. The former brofriend who’s now hitting on you didn’t magically evolve feelings for you, unless you made such a terrible first impression that it took him a while to come around. Otherwise, odds are that this bro wanted to fuck you from the start and just had zero game. Think about it, what makes him such a good “friend”? Does he try to make you laugh? Does he compliment you/go out of his way to make you feel good about yourself? Does he offer to do a lot of favors for you? Does he try to build a connection by sussing out common interests and ideologies? If that sounds like your brofriend, congratulations: you’ve been hanging out with a guy who’s been trying to fuck you but isn’t very good at it.

If there’s someone in your circle of friends who wants to fuck you, that person is not your friend. Think about the guy you’re crushing on - do you refer to him as “my brofriend I want to fuck”? No, he’s just the guy you want to go out with. Whenever you find yourself dealing with a former friend who now wants to be more, you’ll finally know what it feels like for a guy to be on the receiving end of a delusional dater. It’s the same thing. Every benign act of normal friendship gets interpreted as affection. Telling them how nice they are or how good of a friend they are only leads them to believe they’re making progress but aren’t quite there yet. It’s the most frustrating thing in the world, because while you were dumb enough to believe that this guy was somehow extra nice to without wanting anything in return, he was dumb enough to believe he was slowly summiting fuck mountain.

When you say you don’t want to “lose his friendship,” what is it you’re afraid of losing, exactly? Attention? A servant? I know that getting other people to do shit for you is a tenet of betchiness, but I don’t recall reading anything about being a needy attention whore. Think about it, you wouldn’t tolerate a “boyfriend” who only wanted to fuck you and not do anything else, so why would you tolerate a “friend” who does what you want a friend to do but insists on fucking you? You wouldn’t, or at least shouldn’t. You don’t have to stress over letting him down in a way that maintains the friendship, because he didn’t become your friend for the sake of friendship to begin with.

If you want a guy friend, get a fucking dog.

Have a pressing and/or stupid question for the Head Pro? Email him at headpro@betcheslovethis.com or follow him on Twitter @BetchesHeadPro.